Sony has been getting ready for the end of physical game discs for a while now. Turns out, they’ve already put €30 million ($34 million) into converting their disc factory in Thalgau, Austria into something else entirely.
Optical microlenses are the new game in town. They manipulate light and go into camera sensors, AR/VR headsets, fiber optic networks, and medical devices. Quite the pivot from stamping out PlayStation discs.
The Thalgau plant currently cranks out 600,000 discs every day. Half of that volume is PlayStation games. CEO Dietmar Tanzer expects disc production to drop to just 10% of current output by 2028.
That’s the same year Sony announced PlayStation is going fully digital.
Workers only got the news on July 1, the same day Sony made the digital-only announcement public. But management says the conversion has been in the works for a while. The 300 employees at the plant will be retrained for microlens production, which starts next year.
This isn’t just any disc factory — it’s where Sony’s DADC (Digital Audio Disc Corporation) is based. DADC used to run a massive facility in Terre Haute, Indiana that made 23 billion discs from 1983 until it closed in 2022. Since then it’s manufactured another 3.4 billion discs. Now that run is winding down.
Game preservation advocates aren’t happy. But Sony’s already moving on.
